The long-term, sustainable success of our business depends on maintaining a safe workplace where every voice is valued, every talent is cultivated, and everyone has
equal access to opportunities.
Governance and oversight
We maintain transparency by actively reporting on employment-related disputes, such as unfair dismissal or labour practices. We track these cases to gain insights into our labour relations climate. Additionally, whistleblower activities and related mechanisms provide a holistic view of employee relations and organisational ethics.
HR governance enables fair labour practices, diversity and employee wellbeing through policies that support legal compliance, operational effectiveness and sustainable growth.
Our employee relations practices are governed by relevant labour laws in each jurisdiction. Comparable legislative frameworks as set by the International Labour Organization guide our practices in other regions, including Papua New Guinea, where union representation is less centralised and employee relations committees play a prominent role.
In South Africa, the wage review implementation committee continuously reports on progress in meeting obligations from collective agreements. The HR department reports on employee relations to the South African executive committee on a monthly basis. We also submit reports to regulators, especially the Department of Labour and the Department of Mineral and Petroleum Resources.
To ensure effective execution of responsibilities assigned to people, there is necessary accompanying accountability for delivery of results; HR and training personnel focus on compliance with all relevant labour laws and internal policies, managing recruitment, onboarding, employee relations and development programmes. They address employee concerns, foster engagement, and promote retention, aiming to create a positive workplace culture across all operations.
Related policies
FY25 performance
Wages and benefit spend
R20.2 billion
Total employee complement
47 111
permanent employees and contractors
percentage of women in the workforce
21%
percentage of women in management
23%
Training spend
R859 million
Voluntary Turnover
1.9%
Our strategy: Values-driven people management
To support our people, we create a safe, healthy and productive working environment by investing in our workforce’s wellbeing, development and empowerment. Our people management approach, grounded in our values and meaningful engagement, encourages and promotes continuous development of capacity and capability, improving female representation to promote gender diversity, building future organisational skills and considering technological changes.
As Harmony expands into other commodity markets, we adapt and evolve our approach to meet local needs. Driven by our people excellence strategy, the people value chain enables us to effectively analyse, plan, lead, influence and manage employee-related processes.
Strategic pillars of people excellence
Promoting a culture that values its members, cultivates an atmosphere of hope, trust, respect and collaboration, instills a profound sense of belonging and empowers employees to give of their best.
- Embed an enabling organisational culture
- Mould a positive culture through leadership guided by our values
- Build, integrate an efficient people information system based on digitisation and automation technologies
- Integrated talent management system focused on: career development, personal growth, attraction, retention, succession planning
- Ensuring a competitive compensation and rewards system
- Review and build a compelling EVP
- Implement employee engagement measurement metrics
- Reinforce a fair ER policy and processes
- Ensuring a diverse workforce, fair treatment and processes – every employee to feel a sense of belonging and everyone to feel a valued member and contributor
Attracting and retaining key skills and experience
Our talent attraction and retention policy outlines Harmony’s comprehensive approach to attracting, sourcing, onboarding and integrating top-tier talent. We offer a range of developmental and support initiatives aligned with our long-term business goals.
Harmony is committed to narrowing the pay gap over time, with voluntary disclosures of the ratio between the highest and lowest paid employees, anticipating future regulatory requirements. We remunerate employees based on ability, skills, knowledge and experience, with a clear commitment to gender and race equality. We remunerate men and women equally for equivalent roles, regardless of race or other arbitrary factors.
The Harmony global Employee Value Proposition (EVP) being developed aims to serve as one of the vehicles to attract and retain talent, and enhance our culture and performance. The EVP will clearly define the unique benefits and values that employees gain in return for their skills, capabilities and experiences.
Committing to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)
Harmony is committed to equal opportunity, diversity and non-discrimination and has a zero-tolerance policy for any form of discrimination. Employment, development and promotion are based solely on merit, with explicit prohibitions against discrimination on grounds such as race, gender, religion, age, disability, sexual orientation, or political beliefs. HR interventions target increasing the representation of women and people from designated groups.
In South Africa, we are guided by our transformation and employment equity plans to comply with regulations, and achieve our long-term goal to create a workforce that equitably represents the diversity of our population. This is further driven by our Women in Mining committees at our South African operations, creating awareness, enforcing safe work practices and advancing our zero-tolerance approach to sexual harassment, bias and bullying.
Our DEI initiatives in Australasia include holding leaders accountable for DEI commitments, providing training to our workforce on the importance of an inclusive workforce, reducing our gender pay gap, and eliminating unconscious bias in our hiring processes.
Achieve LMS
As part of our digital transformation in learning, we have implemented a learning management system (Achieve LMS) in our South Africa region that delivers interactive and modernised content through micro-learning modules. We have redesigned training material to cater for diverse generational learning preferences.
Investing in learning and development
Harmony is invested in its learning and development efforts across all regions, sharing knowledge and improving learning systems across regions to make learning more effective and engaging.
We support quality education and promote a culture of lifelong learning for our employees and community youth through internship programmes, learnerships, graduate development programmes, bursary schemes, study assistance and career progression programmes. Developing our people supports our commitment to equal employment opportunities while redressing the historic disadvantages in employment, education and training experienced by individuals in designated groups in South Africa.
Our South Africa region has various accredited training centres providing learning for technical and non-technical skills. Employees can also enrol for formal education at preferred institutions of higher learning through our study assistance programme. These formal education opportunities include first degrees and postgraduate qualifications such as MBA and executive MBA qualifications.
Our succession pipeline for core disciplines (mining, engineering, metallurgical and ore reserve management) includes longer-term developmental programmes.
Fostering a healthy organisational culture and employee wellbeing
We conduct initiatives that enable us to foster a safe, inclusive and high-performing culture that supports the physical, mental and financial health of our workforce while creating operational excellence. These include diagnostic tactics such as company culture values assessments every three years, interim pulse surveys, systemic and humanistic perception surveys every two years, as well as gender inclusion diagnostics1, and feedback routines that guide targeted interventions and culture improvement actions.
Building a positive workplace culture
Fostering a healthy organisational culture and employee wellbeing In FY24, we conducted our fourth Barrett Culture Survey across South African operations, with 23 517 employees participating (54% of the regional workforce). Harmony achieved a culture score of 76%, significantly above the global average of 55% and industry average of 53%, indicating a strong and healthy organisational culture
Culture improvement plans are being developed at all operations to address aspects requiring intervention.
Maintaining sound employee relations
Our employee relations approach is based on mutual respect and trust. Supported by living our values and culture, we engage and collaborate meaningfully with employees to better understand and address their needs and expectations. We adopt a proactive approach to prevent potential conflicts and enter into long-term agreements to ensure long-term sustainability and labour peace. The actions we take to enable employee safety and contribute to their health and mental wellbeing support our approach to maintaining positive employee relations.
We have established several management and organised labour forums to facilitate proactive engagement with organised labour representatives. Union recognition is governed by an employee relations framework that regulates organisational rights of unions. In regions like Australia, union presence is less direct at the site level, with employee relations primarily managed through committees rather than formal union representation. This regional variation is reflected in our tailored approach to employee relations.
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Further information
Additional performance-related discussions and data may be found in these publications.